Doctor Who

[Geoff_B]

So, will we get a non-contemporary Earth companion now? Either past/future Earth or alien? Come on!

And then the companion from the past was among the cybermen wandering about (along with Jamie, Amy, Rory, and a bazillion iterations of Clara).

So hang on -

Ian, Barbara, Dodo, Ben, Polly, Jamie, Victoria, Liz, Jo, Benton, Yates, Sarah Jane, Harry, Tegan, Ace (possibly), Adam, Martha, Ianto, Gwen, Amy, Rory and a whole load of other friends/companions were potentially wandering about.

Not sure how I feel about that...

[tbug]

I figure that the contemporary companions are probably still mostly canonically alive. Ian and Barbara teach at Cambridge and have never aged, and a couple years ago Liz was working on the moonbase.

But yeah. Potentially any/all of those people were cyberwandering.

[Darkflame]

While everyone was being converted, it was quite clear not everyone was converted yet. (the "heatmap" diagram of the graves with the red highlighting).

Giving time everyone would have been, but (given people could still move without being squashed by shear numbers) only a tiny fraction was during the period of the episode - presumably biased towards the newer deceased.

[tbug]

Agreed, DF. Both Geoff and I used the word "potentially" for this very reason.

I've also been thinking about Rory. He was an auton for a bit, and he would have received the mental commands the Master broadcast to all autons on the planet during Terror of the Autons (though presumably he ignored him). Do you think that if he was indeed cyberconverted during this episode he might have recognized the telepathic signature, as it were?

[Master Gunner]

Well, he was an auton in sort of a pocket-universe, wasn't it? His auton memories got merged with his "real" memories when the Doctor did the whole restarting-the-universe thing, but there's no guarantee he experienced all the same events that happened in the "main" timeline.

I was never quite clear on what happened in that season finale, actually.

[tbug]

Sure, all of that is true. My idle musings are pretty far-fetched, no question.

[empath]

Touche, Dale!

But yeah, methinks Twelve is gonna go stop in with old friends in Victorian London.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I still don't buy the Victorian Scooby Squad are The Doctor's friends.

Offscreen relationships erk me. I don't mind "things to come", but introducing random character from the past we never met before because the attached adventure wasn't exciting enough to become on TV is annoying.
Like the Papal Mainframe Lady.

I would be like if Clara meeting and beginning to date Danny happened off screen. One day Clara magically has a boyfriend. Like how she magically is a fangirl for Robin Hood.

I wish there were some reference to her "obsession". Like when Smith is in her bedroom, there's something Robin Hoody in the general area. I don't buy a character having a convenient interest in same theme of an episode.

[tbug]

Had Jenny (who also might have been cybermanned last episode) met the Doctor before A Good Man Goes to War? We know that Madam Vastra has, and that eleven into twelve wasn't the first regeneration she'd witnessed. Maybe we'll get to see her first meeting with him some day.

[Master Gunner]

I don't believe she did. I just rewatched that scene, and Jenny didn't know what the TARDIS was when it appeared their house, and Vastra simply said that it meant an old debt was to be repaid instead of mentioning the Doctor.

[Lord Hosk]

I have been very disappointed in the past three years of the show. The writing is just so bad, and bland.

Every character is one dimensional and any time they have any depth it turns out that it was in fact just a lie they told when in reality they are just a simple card board cut out of a common trope.

[Arclight_Dynamo]

Basically need to agree with you, Hosk. A lot of the recent stuff just seems... hollow? Lacking? It's hard to pin down.

The whole thing just seems kind of... meh. Not bad (usually), but not terribly good, either.

Like that episode on a Soviet submarine. That had such potential. Instead, it was just... blah. Hollow.

I wonder if the writing isn't trying to be too clever for its own good. Just tell a good story with a decent emotional payoff. Don't try for cleverness, or epicness, or any of that nonsense. Just... good stories. Please.

Hell, the UK has so many good SF writers right now, it isn't even funny. Pick a dozen, give them each an episode. I'd love to see a Doctor Who ep written by Alastair Reynolds, say, or Charlie Stross. Hell, give American writers a crack at it - I'd kill for an ep by Mary Robinette Kowal.

New blood, is what I'm saying. New ideas. New directions. Do something interesting.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I disagree with you two Well, mostly.
I think the themes of this series are very good. To me it's the Year of Grey. I adore this.

I do agree sometimes dialogue writing could be better. As well as justification for "cool set pieces" beyond the sake of being "cool". Why did the Doctor become president in the sky other than to make The Doctor cooler and to have peril at height?

Why did Danny kidnap Clara to a graveyard?

[Robo4900]

I disagree with you two Well, mostly.
I think the themes of this series are very good. To me it's the Year of Grey. I adore this.

Agreed.

I do agree sometimes dialogue writing could be better. As well as justification for "cool set pieces" beyond the sake of being "cool". Why did the Doctor become president in the sky other than to make The Doctor cooler and to have peril at height?

Why did Danny kidnap Clara to a graveyard?

The president of Earth thing does make a bit of sense, the graveyard thing... I don't know, dramatic effect? Metaphors? Perhaps the Cyberman part of him was sort of calling him there on a subconscious level?

Anyway, so if Rory was revived by the Cybermen, that would make his deaths total reach about 6. Nothing in particular to say about it, I just want to put that out there...

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

And everyone forgets the number of times Amy has been ressurected.

[empath]

Because she's got legs; dying a lot is Rory's thing.

[Lord Hosk]

So im just thinking logistically here. Every Dead person in a cemetery morgue... from all time, is turned into a cyberman.

in some cases sure there is a fresh body there, forget about the logistics of all that metal. But in some cases there is nothing but maybe bone fragments left. What is the point of having that at all? Like if you are just going to make a cyberman out of three ribs and half a femur why do you need those components at all? why not just build a robot?

[tbug]

"From all time" meaning for as long as the Master has been on Earth gathering souls into the Nethersphere. Has there been any indication as to how long that's been?

And might the Master have crossed his/her own timeline in the process?

[Hiramas]

Well, maybe the biomatter has some connectiong to the saved mind?
But why not just save the mind on a cyber-harddrive?

The concept of the cyberman is quite fuzzy after all. While the Star Trek Borg clearly show resemblance and may be even plagiarized from Who, how they work is better explained.

On the other hand, these weren't real cybermen. Missy made them without the core of what it means to be cybermen.

In the end, this is, like so often, a "go with it" moment of dr. who. Logic and Who don't go together very well.....

[Arclight_Dynamo]

I think the themes of this series are very good. To me it's the Year of Grey. I adore this.

So do I; that's fine. The themes aren't the problem. The actual execution of individual episodes, characters, and storylines is the problem.

[tbug]

We rewatched The Deadly Assassin after Dark Water to remind ourselves how the time lord tech that saves people's minds/souls/whatever at the moment of death worked, and the time lords had a real prejudice against the people actually dead versus the people who went into that story's version of the Nethersphere with still-living bodies on the outside. I'm not sure how this applies. Maybe Missy just wanted to taunt the Doctor, and used all of humanity as her tools for doing so?

I've often thought that the relationship between the Doctor and the Master was just a massive love triangle with the Earth as the third member. The Master only cares about the Earth because the Doctor obsesses over it, so there's no reason not to seriously mistreat the entire planet and everyone who lives here.

[empath]

Very good point - the Master keeps singling out the Earth and humanity, just to get back at that which stole his/her best friend.

[Lord Hosk]

"From all time" meaning for as long as the Master has been on Earth gathering souls into the Nethersphere. Has there been any indication as to how long that's been?

And might the Master have crossed his/her own timeline in the process?

Didnt the doctor say "as long as humans have had a idea of the afterlife"?

and since there have been human burials back at least 10,000 years, we can say at least all of history if not most of prehistorical human existence and burial is typically associated with an existence beyond. I stress typically, its not exclusive.

[tbug]

Didnt the doctor say "as long as humans have had a idea of the afterlife"?

and since there have been human burials back at least 10,000 years, we can say at least all of history if not most of prehistorical human existence and burial is typically associated with an existence beyond. I stress typically, its not exclusive.

That is indeed what the Doctor said. Rule One, and all that.

If the Doctor was telling the truth then the Master has been on the Earth for ten thousand years harvesting souls, and possibly has regenerated many times in the process. This seems unlikely, if only because of how impatient the Master sometimes gets. Maybe the Nethersphere was set up ten thousand years ago and the Master just popped in occasionally, but I'm not convinced. Frankly, we need more data.

I do think that the Master would have programmed the Nethersphere to nab her soul if/when she died, so there's a built-in reason for her coming back. She probably was even the one to create the process to recreate a soul's body, like we saw at the end of the episode.

[Darkflame]

I'm not even sure the Doctor would know how long its been around. Unless I am forgetting something (which I may well be) I think hes just guessing.